Is Angela Hunt another tool of the union?

Yesterday's post, which appears right below this one, discussed how the Service Employees International Union (SIEU) had purchased the votes of a number of Dallas City Council members, forcing those members to vote against the best interests of Dallas citizens and taxpayers and, in doing so, forcing these council members to mumble gibberish to mask the real reasons why they were voting the way they were.

I didn't think District 14 council member Angela Hunt was among them, but now I am not so sure. She is either mumbling the gibberish or she is just stupid and I don't think the latter is true. In her blog explanation in which she explained why she voted to defer a decision on a system for the Sanitation Department that could save the city and thus us taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, Ms. Hunt said "if we do have an extra $700k, I think we should spend it on giving our sanitation workers a raise. They make minimum wage right now, and $700k would almost get them to a living wage."

One would think that someone inside the City of Dallas, like a city council person, would know more about the operations of that city than someone outside the city, like yours truly. That's why I think Hunt is masking her union buyout with false gibberish. First "our sanitation workers," as she calls them, make far more than minimum wage. Second "our sanitation workers," those that are employed by the City of Dallas and receive pay checks from the City of Dallas are the truck drivers, the workers the SEIU wants to unionize. Many of these trucks are automated and, with the carts the city provides residents, a driver can dump a resident's garbage into his truck without ever leaving his cab. In some cases, however, laborers are needed to manually retrieve the trash and dump them into the truck. These laborers, who are NOT City of Dallas employees, are NOT paid by the city, are the ones making minimum wage. They work for a company that won the bid to provide this service to the city.

Now, do these workers deserve more money? Sure they do. I'm not going to argue about that. But the way to accomplish this and the only way to accomplish this, and I would be shocked if Ms. Hunt didn't know this, is by forcing the issue when the current contract for this labor expires. When that's about to happen, the City Council should vote to instruct the Procurement Department to insist, in its request for bids, that all those who reply agree to pay their laborers $XXXX, whatever amount the council decides. Of course, that means the contract will be more expensive, our sanitation fees will increase, perhaps as much as 15 cents a month (perhaps more if the union succeeds in killing the GPS plan), but that is the only way to raise the pay for these workers.

Ms. Hunt is also misrepresenting another fact. She wrote in that same blog entry "If we cleared the problem alleys, we'd speed up service and prevent our men from speeding down streets to make up for lost time (not that they should be speeding anyway). I don't really think we've got the money to do this... " The truth is, she knows the City doesn't have enough money to do this. She was presented with a detailed analysis of what such an endeavor would cost -- $23 million. Why she just doesn't come clean with all this is beyond me. I offered two possible reasons, both of which frighten me.